Alopekia: Mangy as a Fox

Georgia L. Irby-Massie (College of William and Mary)

Hair was (and remains) a powerful symbol of wealth, status, modesty, and vanity. Medusa’s snaky coils repelled; the long locks of the Achaean heroes at Troy flowed; the Trojan women mourned with shorn locks; Berenikê’s hair became the constellation Coma Berenikê; Julius Caesar famously endeavored to disguise his male-patterned baldness with a ‘comb-over’ and valued above all his honors the right to wear a laurel wreath (Suet. Div. Iul. 45); and Ovid reproached his mistress for dying her hair which consequently fell out, compelling her to wear a wig (Am 1.14).

The phenomenon of hair loss was studied by medical and scientific writers, who offered explanations and cures (e.g., Pliny (NH 24.13-14, 39, 86, 122, 170; 27.138; 28.121, 163-165, 170; 29.106-110; 32.35, 67, 141, 145).  For Hippokrates, an imbalance of phlegm induced hair loss (alopekia: Aff. 35). Further, Galen’s compendious corpus preserves over fifty hair loss remedies recorded from a dozen medical writers (12.392-420 Kühn). These treatments are compounded largely from sympathetically magical ingredients such as maidenhair, hair from rabbits and bears, and roots, including reed, cyclamen, and asphodel. Preparations frequently included singing, heating in vapor baths. The poultices were applied with honey or oil. Galen also recorded foreign and surgical treatments (14.413, 782 Kühn). Celsus (de Med 6.4), alone of the medical writers, distinguished alopekia (fox-mange: Galen 12.382, 14.326 Kühn) from other types of hair loss, including ophiasis (ringworm) and perhaps phalakrotes (baldness). Aristotle (Pr. 893b38), Pliny, Galen and others used the term alopekia indiscriminately in referring to hair lost through disease or age. Phalokrates does not appear even once in Galen.

This paper will examine different types of hair loss, especially alopekia, and its remedies, including ingredients, preparation, application, and the extent to which such treatments were considered efficacious.